171–180 of 187 posts
Recently linear algebra has come to the fore for AI.
You need all the math for the domain. If you are in engineering, games, DSP, ML, then that can be a lot . At the same time some developers can go a whole career without ever (knowingly) using a floating point number. They work with web sites/services/databases/apis etc. But developers should at least know basic calculus, logic, and what what you need to grok basic algorithms and data structures. That part of math isn…
I still fail to see how calculus relates to programming for what most people do. Web or not.
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> Numbers don't exist in any real sense I'd argue they do, numbers arise when counting and counting is definitely a part of our reality. It is pretty hard to imagine a universe where you can't count things.
I agree. Counting might not have any intrinsic relationship to the physics of the universe, but it's a strange universe where thinking beings can exist, yet are incapable of constructing the mathematical rules that would allow them to count.
On the contrary, it’s very interesting to explore the consequences of something we take for granted being actually wrong or unnecessary.
The question seems a bit backwards to me (who come to programming from maths). I am more familiar with the opposite question "how much, if any, programming do you need for math?" Every year I meet lots of math students who love math but hate the very idea of programming, as if it was a dirty and unnoble thing to do. I have to convince them that sometimes it may be useful for them. The best course of action is to star…
I didn't get a CS degree precisely because I bombed out of math so bad in high school that I couldn't get admission to any program. Here in Canada a good grade in academic-stream high school math was simply mandatory for admission to any BSc program. Took a philosophy BA instead, though didn't finish it... dropped out to go get a job programming during the .com boom, and now 25 years later I work at Google. Was a lon…
Perhaps that's why I've always found excellent engineers from Canada's flagship schools (U of British Columbia and U of Toronto) :p
More seriously though, I have an advanced degree in Math and seldom needed it for development work, even when I was working in more quantitative roles. And whenever I did need the knowledge I would just look up and learn again. Glad you're doing well without a traditional background.
A lot more than people make out, at least in my experience. There’s a lot of talk about how you don’t need maths or cs theory but to me this only seems true for certain areas or levels. For me its been especially true with performance, cs theory and maths can help you to know what and where to optimise and give you ideas on the how.
Jonathan Blow has a good talk about this. He says when he interviews he wants somebody that will default to a naive implementation (because most code is not performance-sensitive and you should optimize for development time in those cases), but he expects people to have a wide knowledge of tricks and techniques for the ~10% that is performance sensitive. That seems fair to me, as somebody who probably wouldn't pass h…
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I agree. Counting might not have any intrinsic relationship to the physics of the universe, but it's a strange universe where thinking beings can exist, yet are incapable of constructing the mathematical rules that would allow them to count.
For a while, people thought that a universe in which Euclid’s postulates would be wrong would be very strange indeed. In my opinion it is short-sighted to go from “it’s weird (to us, right now)” to “it’s impossible”. On the contrary, it’s very interesting to explore the consequences of something we take for granted being actually wrong or unnecessary.
In such a universe, how is conscious thought even possible?
As I recall, the emphasis was primarily on graph theory with no applications. Maybe its nice to have for a undergrad CS major but even there I wonder what percentage will go on to actually need/use such material? I suspect it is fairly niche.
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I agree with everything you’ve said, but I want to push back on the (non-load-bearing) “few have much energy for fighting the idea that literature should be studied for it’s own sake.” It seems to me that lots of people have endless energy for this fight, unfortunately.
You know honestly, we as an entire whole of the world should just go back to hands on training. Forget studying the same crap for 15-20 years of our lives to have a damn calculator to solve basic adding and subtracting that's done on a cash register in our daily lives. How many of you solve out of this world equations in your daily life? 95% of the world doesn't. We all use basic add and subtract. Hardly anyone knows…